A score is arithmetic over a checklist, not a judge's verdict. Here is the whole checklist: what is checked, at which moment, and against which limit. If a flight scored lower than you expected, the answer is on this page.
How the score adds up
Every check carries a weight. Passed checks award their weight, failed ones award nothing, and checks that are not applicable drop out of the sum entirely. The total is normalised to a 0–100 scale, and the grade follows from it.
Flight stages
The tracker works out the stage from telemetry and applies only that stage's checks. The figure next to each stage is its total weight: the larger it is, the more that stage moves your result.
Every check and its limit
State checks (lights, configuration) only count against you when the mismatch is sustained — five seconds in a row, not a single frame. Pitch and bank have their own, shorter grace period — three seconds: turbulence does not become a remark. Overspeed is forgiven for exactly one moment, one second: you can neither build up speed nor react within it, and a wind step at cruise level raises the sim's warning for less than that. G-load, stall and crash trigger instantly, off a single frame.
On the ground: taxi and takeoff
In the air: climb and cruise
Approach
Taxi in
Landing
The landing is the one thing graded on a sliding scale rather than pass or fail — and the most expensive one at that: 32 of the 111 weights. The scale is CONTINUOUS: the score moves smoothly between the reference points, so an extra ten fpm no longer drops you a step. Those reference points come from real aviation, where a hard landing starts at 600 fpm — and that is exactly where the check stops counting as passed.
If there were several touchdowns, the FIRST one counts — the very number your landing-rate counter showed you. Wheel contact within 15 seconds after liftoff is not a landing: it happens on the takeoff roll, when the aircraft briefly settles back onto its wheels. A bounce is not free, but it is judged by its own check: it looks at how much harder the next touchdown was than the one that counted. Anything up to 100 fpm harder is not held against you — a slight skip happens on good landings too. Airframe damage, however, is assessed from the HARDEST touchdown: the gear does not care which one it was.
Touchdown G-load is scored separately: up to 1.12 earns full marks, then it tapers off smoothly, 1.33 is the hard-landing threshold, and 1.55 or above scores almost nothing. The numbers look unusually small, and that is not a typo. We compute the G-load OURSELVES, from how fast the descent rate is arrested, instead of reading the simulator's own figure. The reason is simple: the figures MSFS and X-Plane report are not comparable. A measurement over 449 flights showed X-Plane running 0.40 higher on average at the same descent rate — the old 2.1 threshold was never once reached in MSFS, while in X-Plane it failed every fifth landing. The check was judging your choice of simulator, not your flying. Our figure is computed identically in both sims, and its scale nodes sit exactly where the paired descent-rate thresholds do. For the same reason the number must not be held against anyone else's scale: ours is the average rate at which the descent is arrested while the gear compresses, whereas other counters — and real-world aviation — use the PEAK value at the moment of impact. Ours is bound to read lower: about 4 % of landings come out harder than 1.33 on our scale, while the same landings judged by the simulator's own G-load would give 18 % in MSFS and 90 % in X-Plane; the real-world hard-landing inspection thresholds (1.8–2.2 g on Boeings) are peak values too. Our number is only worth comparing against our own thresholds.
Why these points came off
Every check in the flight debrief has a “Why this” button; if the list of checks is folded into an “All checks and why” block, open it first. The button opens what the score was made of: the verdict in one sentence, the scale with your value marked on it and the price in points, and for the landing also “Touchdown second by second”: touchdown at zero, from 50 feet to six seconds after it, a chart on top chosen by tab (descent, load factor, pitch and bank, speed) and below it height above the runway, nose movement and load factor on a shared axis. Move the mouse or a finger over the chart and every lane shows its value at the same moment; above the chart sit the numbers at touchdown and the airborne time if you bounced. Descent is drawn relative to the surface itself rather than the horizon, so runway slope and humps show up. Further down the flight page there is a “How the aircraft came down” card (it and its neighbour may be folded into an “Approach profile and runway centreline” block): the approach from the side, drawn by hand on squared paper, with a 3° glide path and notes such as “level” or “steep down”. Next to it, “Holding the centreline” shows the same approach from above: runway pointing up, the aircraft drawn at its true angle and the nose-to-centreline angle alongside. You can see how far off the centreline you touched down, how you held the crosswind and how many seconds after touchdown the nose was straightened. If the flight was recorded by tracker 1.29 or newer (1.29.1 for ToLiss in X-Plane), you can also see how you worked the controls: in “Touchdown second by second” the nose-movement lane gives way to the stick, pull / push as a percentage of travel, plus the trim at touchdown, and the top view adds the stick left / right and the pedals. The solid line is what you put in (the sidestick on an Airbus), the dashed one is where the control surface went. Older recordings keep the nose-movement lane with a “recording without stick position” note. If the stick in the recording moves against the aircraft — which happens when an add-on has an inverted sign — it is not drawn, and the log says so. And if the sim does not report the stick at all, tracker 1.30 takes it from your joystick axes (see the Tracker chapter), and such a line is labelled “from your joystick”. The tracker’s decision log sits under a disclosure there as well. A check can pass and still cost points: “passed” is about the threshold, while points come off gradually, and the panel explains the two separately.
When a check is not applicable
A check that is not applicable neither penalises nor rewards — it simply drops out of the sum, and the remaining weights are normalised again. That happens in four cases.
- The aircraft does not have what is being checked — spoilers on light aircraft, for instance. The same goes for a type that has spoilers but nothing to arm them with: on the E-Jet, ERJ and Legacy the ground spoilers deploy on their own from weight on wheels and wheel spin-up, and there is no ARM lever in the cockpit at all. If the track shows the panels out after touchdown, arming is not asked of you.
- The tracker could not measure the value. On study-level add-ons the simulator's standard variables are often dead, and a variable that stayed silent all flight means “not measured”, not “violated”.
- The stage never happened — or THIS recording never saw it. Take off straight from the runway without taxiing and the taxi checks are not applicable; go from final straight to rollout and the approach checks are not applicable. Restarting the tracker mid-flight lands here too: the recording resumes wherever the aircraft is now, and the stages that went by before the restart cannot be judged — the tracker will not accuse you over frames it never saw. A free flight is not scored on its takeoff for the same reason: that recording only opens once the aircraft is confirmed airborne, so it never sees the roll or the liftoff, and the whole Takeoff stage is not applicable.
- You are flying a rotorcraft. Helicopters, gyrocopters and tiltrotors are not held to the fixed-wing pitch gates (in flight and on approach), and their touchdown G-force is not scored: a helicopter sheds speed by raising its nose and lands out of a hover, which looks like an error by aeroplane standards without being one. Vertical speed at touchdown is still scored — that one is common to every aircraft. Structural limits, overspeed and in-flight G stay as well: they are no softer on a rotorcraft.
Frequently asked
I set flaps while taxiing, not before. Why did that used to count as a violation?
It was a tracker bug, fixed in version 1.9.0. Flaps used to be checked on every frame of the entire taxi, so any five seconds with flaps up went into your violations permanently — setting them at the holding point could not undo it. Now there is a single check in a single place: flaps must be set by the start of the takeoff roll. When exactly you set them is your business.
I switch the taxi light off at the holding point so I don't dazzle anyone. Is that a penalty?
No. Only nav lights and the beacon are required continuously, and either of two sources counts for them: the switch or the mask of lights actually lit, so an aircraft whose switch stays silent is not penalised for it. The taxi light just has to come on at least once during the taxi — switching it off as the situation demands is entirely up to you. And if the taxi light variable stayed silent for the whole flight (which happens with study-level add-ons that do not drive the standard dataref), the check is waived rather than failed: you can only be judged on what could be measured.
I turn the landing lights on during the roll, around 80 kt. Does that count?
Yes. The check looks at the moment of liftoff: if the lights are on by then, it passes.
I definitely switched the landing lights on, but the tracker did not count them. Why?
Most likely your aircraft does not report that channel at all. It happens: the Citation Sovereign+ did not set the light SimVars for external programs before version 1.0.4 (the add-on developer has fixed it — update), and on the stock Citation Longitude the landing and taxi lights are broken by a simulator bug in config merging, acknowledged by Working Title. Since version 1.12.3 the tracker works like this. Both "light on" checks (by liftoff and by 1500 ft) look at the switch and at the mask of actually lit lights — either one is enough. If no source ever showed the light while you did switch other lights during the flight, both checks are DROPPED as unmeasurable and the decision log gets a line with the reason: only what could be measured may be judged. If you did not touch the lights at all that flight, there is nothing to support "the aircraft does not report it" — that is an ordinary remark. The "light off" checks still judge by the switch alone, so that an aircraft with a stuck mask cannot get an accusation it has no way to clear.
I fly X-Plane. Is it true penalties came faster there than in MSFS?
Yes, and that is fixed in 1.9.0 too. Grace periods used to be counted in telemetry frames, and X-Plane sends them five times more often than MSFS — “five frames” meant five seconds in one simulator and one second in the other. They are all expressed in seconds now, and both simulators behave identically.
I switched the landing lights off a few seconds after 10,000 ft. Did I lose the point?
No. You get 30 seconds of grace. The penalty only lands on lights left on for the whole climb. And when you depart the US or Canada, the tracker only asks about the lights above 18,000 ft: many American airlines switch them off at FL180, the Class A boundary. No country has a law about this, it is an airline procedure, and in Europe and Russia it is 10,000 ft.
The descent used to allow 280 knots below 10,000 ft. Why 260 now?
We checked the scoring against real-world rules. 250 knots below 10,000 ft applies to everyone in the US and Canada, and in Europe and Russia arrival procedures and ATC impose it almost everywhere. 260 is the same 250 with a margin for the needle. We also closed a gap in the climb: speed used to be checked there only up to 3,000 ft above ground. Heavy aircraft (wake category H and J: B777, B747, A380, An-124) get up to 290: FAA rules let them fly faster when their minimum safe speed at their weight is above 250. Altitude comes from the altimeter, with a 3-second hold.
I lower the gear at 2,000 ft, per SOP. Is that too late?
No. Configuration is checked below 1,000 ft AGL — the stabilised-approach gate — even though the approach stage starts at 3,000. Above 1,000 ft, gear up is not a violation: on a vectoring platform the aircraft is legitimately clean.
My landing-rate counter read softer than the debrief. Who is right?
First the simple part: if there were several touchdowns, check which one you are comparing. The first one is scored — usually the same one your counter shows — while airframe damage is assessed from the hardest. If the figures differ on the same touchdown, look at the G-load in the counter's log. A peak below 1.0 g at touchdown is physically impossible, so the figure was not captured at the moment of impact — and the vertical speed on the same line is not about the touchdown either. From there, two common cases: the counter sampled the vertical speed half a second after contact, once the gear leg had already absorbed the descent, or it derives it from height above the terrain while still BEFORE the threshold, where the ground is not the runway yet and falling terrain drags the number down. If the runway itself slopes, though, your counter is the one more likely to be right: the gear feels closure with the runway, and we now score that too — see the tracker chapter. The debrief keeps the frames around the touchdown at the simulator's frame rate: if you believe the mistake is ours, post in Suggestions with the flight number — it is all there, second by second.
Why can't a manual report score above 70?
In a manual report the pilot types in the touchdown rate, and there is nothing else to verify. Without the cap, a form would be worth more points and XP than a flight honestly flown with the tracker. For the same reason a manual report only counts once the flight's estimated block time has passed since booking: filed sooner, the flight stays in your history but brings no money, no costs and no XP.
I still think a check fired unfairly. What now?
First open “Why this” on the check itself: it shows what exactly was measured, which threshold judges it and how many points it cost. If the explanation still disagrees with what happened in the cockpit, write to “Feedback” with the flight number. The debrief keeps the whole track, so what happened at that moment can be checked against it.